Suzan-Lori Parks' Heavy-Handed Topdog/Underdog Is Chiefly Grant-Bait

A friend of mine who went to see Topdog/Underdog, the new Suzan-Lori Parks play at the Public Theater, told me afterward she'd been surprised to find it so naturalistic in form. She'd been partly drawn by a photograph in the Voice that pictured the actor Jeffrey Wright got up like Abraham Lincoln in whiteface, wearing a great false beard and oversized stovepipe hat?a wonderful image, she said, that had made her think the play would be as unpredictable and expressionistic as some of Parks' earlier work had been. I was drawn to the Public because I wanted to see Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle perform onstage together. They're two of our most gifted and versatile young actors, I think?interesting not in the common way of actors who draw attention to themselves by being describable, but in the way of actors who choose to do something indescribable because on some level they understand that's what makes it art. Wright got his start working with George Wolfe in Angels in America and Bring in 'Da Noise/Bring in 'Da Funk, but is probably best known to non-theatergoing audiences for his affecting performance as the doomed young graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in Julian Schnabel's 1996 film and for the flamboyant turn he did as a Latino drug kingpin in John Singleton's remake of Shaft.

Cheadle, for his part, won hearts earlier this year as one half of the surveillance team that gets blown up in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but he first captured mine with his performance in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, from the Walter Mosley novel. This was awhile back. Devil in a Blue Dress was the first in Mosley's noir-noir series about Easy Rawlins, a black war-veteran turned private eye in postwar Los Angeles. The movie role was played by Denzel Washington, but Cheadle nearly stole the picture playing a gun-toting thug named Mouse, a character who doesn't exist in the book?that is, he does and he doesn't. The literary version of Mouse is linear, one-dimensional: he represents a number of things the hero, in his quest for upward mobility, wants to distance himself from. Franklin's script turned this figure into a much darker, more complicated construct, a statement about the plight of the violent young black man in contemporary society, about that percentage of the American population that dies before reaching the age of 24. A sort of proto-hiphop figure?like gangsta rappers today, who represent something we all purport to fear and abhor?the director's version of Mouse packed an element of moral recognition for the audience: he was terrifying because he was uncontrollable, but there came a point, late in the picture, when we had become so sick of watching the hero be oppressed?browbeaten and intimidated?that we wanted to see the loose cannon let fly. The very qualities we thought we didn't want in our midst began to seem desirable. Cheadle gave this figure a naive charm and gold-toothed grin that were as feckless as they were frightening.

Cheadle and Wright are witty, electrifying actors who, when they're not aiming at straightforward literal realism, manage to turn iconic representatives of an underclass (the trigger-happy punk, the small-time racketeer) into nonverbal observations that become part of some larger, otherwise inarticulable truth. Unfortunately, Parks' play has them doing a kind of acting that's alien to them both?unsubtle and untruthful.

It's a phony play built around an important truth?that if black people in America are still "enslaved," it's as much a function of the way they get fucked over by their own families as anything else. In Topdog/Underdog, Cheadle and Wright play a pair of down-and-out brothers temporarily living together in a one-room cold-water flat and trying to make a go of it. The play couldn't be more schematic. The brothers are named Lincoln and Booth. Only one, Booth (Cheadle), has title to the stage space (it's his place); the other is homeless (his wife has kicked him out). Both exist in an uneasy alliance with the outside world. Booth spends his days shoplifting and obsessing about a woman who, the audience knows, has no use for him. He wants to team up with his brother running a three-card monte game, and is forever practicing the patter and the moves. But Lincoln, once a virtuoso card-thrower, has sworn off gangs and grifting and now has what he considers a good job, "a sitdown job?with benefits." He has a gig at a penny arcade reenacting the assassination of Lincoln. He sits on a stool, lets customers shoot at him with toy guns and pretends to fall over dead.

Symbolism doesn't get any more heavy-handed than this.

A puff-piece in The New York Times a couple of Sundays back indicated that the funfair Lincoln is an image Parks has used before. Apparently, an earlier and highly expressionistic play had a character called The Foundling Father who had also chosen to spend his days playing the victim in a sideshow reenactment of Lincoln's assassination. I wish I'd seen that. A nonrealistic version of this trope would have the potential for eloquence?say, a neo-vaudeville sketch between two minstrel show characters named Lincoln and Booth. A realistic play about two brothers actually named Lincoln and Booth, one of whom has been hired because of his name by white people to play out the death of Lincoln in whiteface, is mute. It's caving in on itself.

The trouble with Parks' play is partly its form (it's an unsuccessful attempt to marry allegory with socially conscious realism) and partly the fact that she simply isn't a very good writer?of naturalistic dialogue, anyway. The script oozes exposition and contrivance and inept dialogue filled with people telling each other what they already know. Of the parents who deserted them:

Booth: ...They split and we got that room downtown. You was done with school and I stopped going. And we had to run around doing odd jobs just to keep the lights on and the heat going and thuh child protection bitch off our backs.

People don't write plays like this anymore?because audiences don't believe them, any more than they believe top-of-act-two scenes in which one of two characters in a play denies entry to the other. We know A will have to grant B access to the stage in order for the play to go on.

In good plays, when characters say and do unnecessary things, they're using language as a form of action: they're doing something else while they talk?performing, creating. Since theater by its very nature has to applaud anything that entails acting or making something out of nothing, the language-as-action device has the effect of adding a different moral shading to whatever it is the character is doing. If he's lying, plotting, being inhumanly cruel (think of Iago or Richard III or the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross), he's also exercising his humanity, so there's a tension or texture created out of the situation.

Topdog is full of "theatrical" ideas, scenes in which the two brothers perform for themselves or for each other. In one sequence, Lincoln asks Booth to help him with his dying-routine. It's very much like the "Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father" scene between Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, 1. The setup is redolent with possibility and eloquence. But Parks isn't really interested in using theater to say something, however small, about the nature of truth and reality. She wants to editorialize.

Lincoln: Whatdoyathink?

Booth: I dunno, man.

Lincoln: What?

Booth: Something about it was looking too real, or something.

Lincoln: Goddamn you! They don't want it looking too real. I'd scare the customers. Then I'd be out for sure. You're trying to get me fired.

Booth: I'm trying to help. Cross my heart.

Lincoln: People are funny about they Lincoln shit. It's historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.

This is dialogue whoring after a favorable New York Times review.

There are two good scenes, both involving Wright harshly lighted alone onstage. At one point, we get a chance to see him do the three-card monte riff properly. He's riveting?vulnerable and seductive at the same time. And there's an extraordinary sequence in which he sits before a mirror practicing his Lincoln routine. What's wonderful about it is the way it draws on the trope of Lincoln-at-the-theater. Wright looks at himself in the glass, then he pretends to look at something on an imaginary stage. He laughs hollowly, a booming stage laugh. Then he looks at himself again, looks back at the invisible stage and mimes blotting his eye with a handkerchief in response to what he sees. The scene is uncanny, but it's all due to Wright's acting.

For the most part, the level of the material has Cheadle and Wright doing what's probably as close as either of them could come to bad acting. They shout and pace and gesticulate, as if someone had told them that they have to fill the stage with physical rather than with ambient moral energy, all the way through to the predictably "tragic" denouement in which Booth really does shoot Lincoln.

Parks has been widely quoted in the press making self-worshippingly wide-eyed statements about her creative process. "I become the characters and let them speak," she says in a Q&A in the program. But this is humbug. A more calculated style of writing hasn't been seen since the days of Scribe and Sardou. In fact, what she practices is what Shaw famously termed Sardoodledom. She is the contemporary equivalent of the 19th-century's academic playwright.

Plays like Topdog/Underdog are created expressly for critics and teachers. But they also exist for the benefit of the institutional theaters that produce them. Parks' virtue as a playwright lies chiefly in her fundability. She has received grants from?among "many others"?the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts, the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and the National Endowment for the Arts, according to the program.

Why foundations want to support her is puzzling: she can't write. But the reasons for the Public Theater's interest in her work are clear. Her value to George Wolfe consists in the fact that she is such a poor writer. Good writers aren't developable. They just write plays?good plays that don't need to be endlessly workshopped and dramaturged. Good writers don't pay arts administrators' salaries and buy prime real estate in New York. But a playwright like Parks is a meal ticket: she's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Public Theater. Parks and her play are testimony to what's happened to the nonprofit theater in this city. It isn't about art anymore?except in the sense in which a game of three-card monte is art. It's about self-perpetuation and survival.

Topdog/Underdog, through Sept. 2 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 239-6200.